Patrick Dangerfield tipped to smash Brownlow Medal vote record by Champion Data
GEELONG superstar Patrick Dangerfield is being tipped to smash the Brownlow Medal votes record on Monday night after a stellar season.
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PATRICK Dangerfield will smash the Brownlow Medal voting record on his way to an astonishing 41 votes based on the prediction of the AFL’s official statisticians.
Champion Data’s official Brownlow Medal predictor has the Geelong champion polling in as many as 19 AFL games this year.
Dangerfield is the prohibitive $1.20 favourite with TAB Sportsbet and is expected to saunter to his first Brownlow Medal.
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But the greatest talking point will be his capacity to set a handful of new voting records in an individual award first handed out in 1924 to Geelong’s Edward ‘Carji’ Greeves.
Champion Data’s Brownlow predictor, which takes into account voting patterns and a player’s polling history, has Dangerfield on 41 votes and Sam Mitchell on 29.
It believes he can poll in 19 matches, but he needs only to poll in 15 games this year to beat the record of 14 games set by Robert Harvey, Jobe Watson and Dane Swan.
Swan’s 34 votes in 2011 is the most number of votes ever awarded, discounting the tallies of Graham Moss (1976) and Graham Teasdale (1977) when two sets of votes were awarded by umpires.
Last year’s winner, Fremantle star Nat Fyfe, entered the 2015 count as an overwhelming favourite, a burden which he said at stages felt too much and he almost hoped he got suspended.
But he believes Dangerfield is handling the expectations well, and playing like a Brownlow winner.
“Danger is larger than life (in Melbourne) at the moment,” Fyfe said.
“He’s really dominating it all (work-life balance) and doing it really well, presenting himself really well and I guess I can see some similarities to a point where I was last year.”
With Dangerfield’s great mate Rory Sloane ineligible through suspension, the intrigue might be who fills out the placings.
TAB has Richmond’s Dustin Martin on the second line of betting at $9, followed by Sydney’s Luke Parker ($11), Western Bulldog Marcus Bontempelli ($13) and Swan Dan Hannebery ($21).
TAB has Hawthorn’s Mitchell at $26, but Champion Data believes he will finish second on 29 votes (from 16 potential polling matches) followed by Dan Hannebery (28 votes), Matt Priddis (26) and Joel Selwood (23).
The Brownlow Medal will also be a night of mourning for the Cats fraternity as the first Brownlow since the death of 1989 winner Paul Couch, a Cats fan favourite.
Dangerfield wrote in his Sunday Herald Sun column nothing could ease the pain of the lost preliminary final, Brownlow Medal included.
“(It’s) obviously a great award but it doesn’t bring with it what we are all striving for — team success,’’ he said.
“Every year I have been envious of those players who you see get up as soon as the count finished and head straight out the door because they have bigger things happening.
“I desperately wanted to be one of them this year.”
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